Virtual Geekhttp://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/
an insider's perspective, technical tips n' tricks in the era of the VMware Revolutionen-US2015-07-31T13:24:56-04:00

Something to listen to...http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/07/something-to-listen-to.html
Note - I’m behind on posts - and know it. Lots going on that’s keeping me super busy! With everything going on - how to keep up with it all and keep learning in real-time is half the fun :-)...<div><strong><em><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Note - I’m behind on posts - and know it. Lots going on that’s keeping me super busy!</span></em></strong></div>
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<div style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><strong><em>With everything going on - how to keep up with it all and keep learning in real-time is half the fun :-) </em></strong></div>
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<div style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">In my travels – I’m often asked “what do you do to keep learning?” and for recommendations on books, podcasts, and other sources of information. We are all sponges, and being an SE (trying to live the manifesto principles), technologists can’t be stopped from learning. How people learn wildly varies. My persona “3 part formula” for learning is: 1) lots and lots of reading; 2) lots and lots of listening/interacting in the field with customers and with my colleagues at work – as well as the rest of the EMC, VMware and Pivotal exec team; and 3) experiential learning </div>
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<div style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><strong>Reading:</strong> “Tribes", "Good to Great", "The Innovator’s Dilemma" series, "The Phoenix Project", "The New Kingmakers", “Drive", and "Start With Why" are all on my bookshelf. Of course, it’s not all business and tech - there’s a ton of great fiction to balance me out :-) </div>
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<blockquote style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;"><em>Funny story – recently, I loved reading “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu-ebook/dp/B00IQO403K/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1438358812&amp;sr=8-2&amp;keywords=three+body+problem">The Three Body Problem</a>” - a bit of great Sci-Fi which is one of the biggest hits in China and one of the first to become translated into english. It’s fascinating because beyond being a great page turner of a story, you can see that the psychology and culture in eastern cultures is distinctly different than western ones. On a recent trip to APJ, I met with the<a href="http://www.nao.cas.cn/"> National Astronomical Observatories</a> (NAO), Virtual Observatory team in Beijing (who have a cool IaaS cloud and supercomputing clusters – great EMC customer, BTW), and the fact that I was a fan of this book built an immediate connection that transcended boundaries and cultures. Reading opens your mind, and opening your mind is GOOD :-)</em></blockquote>
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<div style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><strong>Experiential Learning:</strong> I use <a href="http://portal.demoemc.com/">vLab</a> (more updates always coming, and big updates soon!) and the <a href="http://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/catalog/123">VMware Hands On Labs </a>a lot. Of course, EMC Education (<a href="http://education.emc.com/">http://education.emc.com</a>) is awesome. I also use <a href="https://www.codecademy.com/">https://www.codecademy.com</a>, <a href="http://run.pivotal.io/">http://run.pivotal.io</a>, and when I need some hosts for my own stuff, I use <a href="http://vca.vmware.com/">http://vca.vmware.com</a>. Frankly, what is a simple google search away these days is pretty well limitless!</div>
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<div style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Increasingly, I’m finding that I’m listening to podcasts as yet another source of information – great while driving, chilling in the hotel, etc.</div>
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<div style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I’m a big fan of <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/speaking-in-tech/id469061956">Speaking in Tech</a>, <a href="https://itun.es/ca/eG45y.c">The Cloudcast</a><a href="https://itun.es/ca/eG45y.c"> (.net)</a> - as well as things that answer my need for non-work things like my love of all things space/physics (<a href="https://itun.es/ca/ADuzt.c">like Star Talk radio</a>).</div>
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<div style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I got asked to join two America’s SEs (Brian Carpenter and Brent Piatti) on their podcast: <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hot-aisle/id996111298?mt=2">The Hot Aisle</a>, and in getting ready, I subscribed and listened, and it’s now part of my pool of learning.</div>
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<div style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><strong><em>SPECIFICALLY – I <span style="text-decoration: underline;">REALLY RECOMMEND</span> EPISODE 8: “VENTURE CAPITAL, MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS AS A STRATEGY WITH SCOTT DARLING”.</em></strong></div>
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<div style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">I’m fortunate enough to see the “behind the scenes” with EMC Ventures and EMC’s Corp M&amp;A team (which are awesome) nearly weekly. Our EMC Ventures and M&amp;A people and process is a huge part of EMC’s secret sauce, and it’s intentionally mostly invisible. This podcast is a reminder to us all of the great team that we have in EMC, and in the Federation, and Scott opens the kimono on a very, very cool part of the EMC Federation. His observations about our open minded culture as a fundamental competitive advantage is right on (and something to carry in your heart every day).</div>
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<div style="font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">Trust me - have a listen!</div>Chad Sakac2015-07-31T13:24:56-04:00A tactical, but awesome update - RecoverPoint for VMs 4.3http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/07/a-tactical-but-awesome-update-recoverpoint-for-vms-43.html
At VMworld 2014 - we announced and then released RecoverPoint for VMs - a simple, easy, purely software-based replication tool for VMware customers that need to start small but be ready to scale up. RecoverPoint for VMs (RP4VM) = enterprise-class...<p>At VMworld 2014 - we <a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2014/08/vmworld-2014-sds-data-protection-recoverpoint-vm.html">announced and then released RecoverPoint for VMs</a> - a simple, easy, purely software-based replication tool for VMware customers that need to start small but be ready to scale up.</p>
<p>RecoverPoint for VMs (RP4VM) = enterprise-class remote replication and DR that is software only + hyper-integrated with vSphere + can protect at a VM-granular level. It can do it with huge replication rates, and with RPOs that are as tight as almost anyone would need.</p>
<p>Then, in January, our first “present of 2015” was making RecoverPoint for VMs <a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/01/first-present-of-15-free-to-use-recoverpoint-for-vms.html">freely available to use</a>. </p>
<p><em>BTW - later in 2015, we did the same with vVNX, ScaleIO, ECS, ViPR and fully open-sourced ViPR - you can see a pattern. Pattern = we think our software needs to be free and frictionlessly accessible. Period. Further - anything focused on the new world of 12-factor/cloud native apps needs to be open-source.</em></p>
<p><strong>Today - big news - RecoverPoint 4.3 is generally available. It’s big enough that we should have called it “5.0”.</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>More flexible: simultaneous remote/local continuous replication.</li>
<li>More “SRM-like” features (important because SRM only supports traditional storage VMFS/NFS level replication - not software based VM-level topologies like RP4VM): re-IP, sequencing, pre-during-post scripting, and more.</li>
<li>More topologies: fan-in and fan-out</li>
<li>More scale: up to 5000 VMs in inventory, 1000 replicated VMs, 32 VMs per consistency group, 128 consistency groups per cluster - up to 40TB VMDKs - WOW. </li>
</ul>
<div>So what I would argue is THE BEST software-only way to replicate your vSphere VMs (and note - that means you can do it on ANY type of storage!) - well, it just got <strong><em>a whole lot better.</em></strong></div>
<p> Itzik Reich wrote a great blog post that has details, demos and more <a href="https://itzikr.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/recoverpoint-for-virtual-machines-rp4vms-4-3-is-here-and-its-awesome/">here</a> - check it out!</p>
<p>What are you waiting for? :-) You can get the bits <a href="http://www.emc.com/products-solutions/trial-software-download/recoverpointforvms.htm">here</a>!</p>Chad Sakac2015-07-14T14:45:48-04:00Container Persistence Part 3: Can I have the &ldquo;easy button please&rdquo;?http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/06/container-persistence-part-3-can-i-have-the-easy-button-please.html
DockerCon is going on monday/tuesday – and no better time to put out some new great tools for people using Containers. This will be a 3 part post – and timed intentionally with DockerCon. Why? Well – containers are indeed...<p><a href="http://www.dockercon.com/">DockerCon</a> is going on monday/tuesday – and no better time to put out some new great tools for people using Containers.</p> <p>This will be a 3 part post – and timed intentionally with DockerCon.&#160; Why?&#160;&#160;&#160; Well – containers are indeed the buzz du jour, and while the ecosystem is still very vibrant (far from settled, with lots of battles being fought), DockerCon has become a critical time for the ecosystem to get together and collaborate.</p> <p>Containers and persistence – what’s the scoop?</p> <p>In yesterday’s <a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/06/container-persistence-part-1-state-of-the-art-of-object-stores.html">“Post 1: Object storage”</a> covered the latest in the dominant persistence for applications built on modern app architectures and on containers – Object storage.&#160;&#160; We talked about the state of the art with EMC ECS.</p> <p>In today’s earlier: “<a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/06/container-persistence-part-2-state-of-the-art-of-transactional-systems.html">Post 2: State of the Art of Transactional Persistence</a>”, we talked about the emerging space of transactional storage and containers, both native implementations (Docker Volumes, Project Rex-Ray) and plugin models (Flocker, and EMC ScaleIO/EMC XtremIO integration).</p> <p>… Now, you might have been reading this and thinking “man, this is new, confusing… I just want an ‘easy button’”.</p> <ul> <li>Answer – Part I = “NO” :-)&#160;&#160; You need to invest to get in the world of Open Source, but it’s worth it.&#160;&#160; Anyone who says otherwise is painting the old stuff in “container washing”.&#160; Pick up your laptop, and get down to coding – it’s fun! </li> <li>Answer – Part II = “… We are working on it”.&#160; </li> </ul> <p>This post is on the “what are we working on to be the “easy button” – because people will need that.&#160; Read on!</p> <p> <p>In talking with a ton of Enterprise customers every day – they recognize that Open Source isn’t “a feature” of this new “Platform 3” world of applications and of data persistence, it’s a CORE element.</p> <p>But – it makes their heads spin off like a top.&#160;&#160; They are not wired for that world.&#160; Unlike pure startups that also have no legacy, they have a huge portfolio of application stacks that are the opposite of these strange ephemeral beasties.&#160;&#160; They are BOLTED to infrastructure resilience expectations.&#160;&#160; It may suck, but those are also the app stacks that power the business.&#160;&#160;&#160; </p> <p>The new cool kids need to respect their elders :-)&#160;&#160; </p> <blockquote> <p><em>“PERSONAL SIDEBAR”: hah – there was no way to get me more angry more quickly than my Dad to say that too me when I was younger, but I begrudgingly see some wisdom there now – happy Father’s day Dad!</em></p> </blockquote> <p>Also – the very nature of Open Source itself – chaotic, ideas winning or losing in an open commons, an open ecosystem, contribution vs. ownership… well, they actually make it harder, not easier for them to actually consume.</p> <p>As Open Source projects mature, what TENDS to happen is that they gravitate towards people who are the “trusted enterprise distributions” (think Redhat, Hortonworks, Cloudera, Docker).&#160;&#160; Great projects like CoreOS that are just a little earlier on their journey – it’s interesting to see them navigate their path.</p> <p>The other path Open Source projects tend to explore is the appliance or service route – where the ultimate manifestation is “just consume the capability” – as an appliance YOU manage (think CloudScaling), an appliance someone ELSE manages (think BlueBox), or as a service itself (think of Pivotal Web Services).</p> <blockquote> <p><em>“BIG IDEA SIDEBAR”: If you re-read those two paragraphs ahead of this one, note that I’m describing the Open Source projects as if they themselves were an “alive thing” – and strangely, they do operate strangely independently, sometimes of their original founders/contributors – going in places people don’t anticipate (or control!)</em></p> </blockquote> <p>We demonstrated something called Project Caspian that we’re working on in EMC.&#160;&#160; It’s intended to be a software/appliance package that “industrializes” a pure opensource stack.&#160;&#160; It will initially focus on Openstack, and quickly add support for Cloud Foundry and the Hadoop ecosystem.&#160;&#160; It is an integrated vehicle for everything awesome we see in the opensource ecosystem – including stuff that EMC, VMware, and Pivotal contribute.</p> <ul> <li>Caspian takes a “purist” approach – Linux “platform 3” apps only.&#160;&#160; Lots of containers, lots of object (ECS), lots of Hadoop, relatively small amount of kernel-mode VMs, relatively small amount of transactional persistence (ScaleIO), some in-memory persistence (DSSD) </li> <li>Caspian uses a disaggregated system architecture – scaling compute/network/storage with some flexibility.&#160; <ul> <li><em>TECHNICAL SIDEBAR: In fact, the “Storage dense” configuration is the likely future of EMC ECS, and the “blended compute/storage” configuration is the likely future of the EMC Data Computing Appliance (currently ships with Greenplum, but over time, would use the full Hadoop ecosystem stacks).</em> </li> </ul> </li> <li>Caspian is intended to be turnkey. </li> <li>Caspian is intended to be easy. </li> <li>Caspian is intended ultimately to have the Engineered System support model – full support and single support from a single vendor, integrated patching/updates, white glove treatment – for the full stack, soup to nuts. </li> </ul> <p>Now, I want to point out something – at the Federation level.&#160; It’s not clear yet strategically whether people will bias down one of these two paths (or whether both will be prevalent):</p> <ol> <li>ONE stack for both their traditional applications (that depend on rich infrastructure resiliency and services) they have virtualized AND their new apps (written following the 12-factor modern app rules and dramatic lack of dependency on infrastructure services – aka apps built “built for the cloud”)… But if they do – we are investing to win, with EVO:RACK, VMware Integrated Openstack, VMware Cloud Native Apps, NSX, VxRack. </li> <li>TWO stacks – one focused on their traditional apps apps that depend on rich infrastructure resiliency and services (VxRack with an open persona, or the EVO:RACK VMware-only persona), and one focused on a purist approach to the new apps (Caspian).&#160;&#160; We’re investing to win down this path also. </li> </ol> <p>I’m blessed that I get to talk to customers across all geographies, all sizes, all segments.&#160;&#160; Anyone who says it’s DEFINITIVELY one way or the other, well – based on feedback, I would be skeptical.&#160; Once you factor out the “pure plays” (companies with no legacy), I’m seeing about equal amounts of 3 groups: 1) those firmly in camp 1; 2) those firmly in camp 2; 3) and a third group – who are confused by everything going on :-)</p> <p>For those of you still interested, and getting a bigger picture at DockerCon that want to learn more about Project Caspian, I would recommend reading this post (and checking out the demo) from EMC World, <a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/05/emc-world-day-3-project-caspian.html">here</a>.</p> <p><strong><em>As you can see, for “Open Source, Platform 3 Purists” is our attempt to make it easy, make it turnkey.</em></strong></p> <p>Caspian still needs work, but is not infinitely away.&#160; The team is furiously working on it.&#160; In fact, we’re getting close enough that we held our first customer council at the beginning of June.&#160;&#160; </p> <p>We were looking for enterprise customers and partners with a ton of Open Source experience.&#160; Some had some large OpenStack, Object stacks, and Cloud Foundry existing deployments.</p> <p>They gave us a ton of feedback – some good, some bad, but on the whole – we’re on the right track.</p> <p>Wish you were there at the customer council?&#160; You could be.&#160;&#160; Think you have opinions on the architecture/use/behaviors of something like Caspian, and how YOU would prioritize features?</p> <p>We want to hear from you :-)</p> <p>We have a Caspian survey up and running, and I’ve encouraged the team to take input from EVERYONE – EMCers, customers, partners, everyone, so have at it!&#160;&#160; <a href="https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BM7ZP9P">Here it is</a>.&#160; We’ll leave it up for two weeks, and then share the feedback!</p></p>Chad Sakac2015-06-23T11:08:15-04:00Container Persistence Part 2: State of the Art of Transactional Systemshttp://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/06/container-persistence-part-2-state-of-the-art-of-transactional-systems.html
DockerCon is going on today and tomorrow – and no better time to put out some new great tools for people using Containers. This will be a 3 part post – and timed intentionally with DockerCon. Why? Well – containers...<p><a href="http://www.dockercon.com/">DockerCon</a> is going on today and tomorrow – and no better time to put out some new great tools for people using Containers.</p> <p>This will be a 3 part post – and timed intentionally with DockerCon.&#160; Why?&#160;&#160;&#160; Well – containers are indeed the buzz du jour, and while the ecosystem is still very vibrant (far from settled, with lots of battles being fought), DockerCon has become a critical time for the ecosystem to get together and collaborate.</p> <p>Containers and persistence – what’s the scoop?</p> <p>In yesterday’s <a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/06/container-persistence-part-1-state-of-the-art-of-object-stores.html">“Post 1: Object storage”</a> I said <strong><em>“A lot of strange new ideas for people used to NAS, SAN, and VVOLS :-)”</em></strong>&#160;</p> <p>Today, I’ll be talking about the OTHER part of the ecosystem of persistence for 12-factor/”Platform 3” apps that operate in the world of containers: the storage that supports transactional use cases, commonly under forms of data fabrics.&#160;&#160; <em><strong>In this, NAS, SAN, VVOLs, heck even the “plugins” and “VAAI” history of vSphere is useful.</strong></em></p> <p>This 2nd post will focus on Docker Volumes – and what we’re doing via the plugin model (via Flocker) and via the native Docker Volumes approach (via Project Rex-Ray, Project Dogged).</p> <blockquote> <p><em>BTW – In spite of today’s post which will be about all the cool things happening in volume management and transactional storage, I want to be clear – Object will remain, IMO the bulk – certainly by capacity – of the persistence model addressed by apps build on the ephemeral container and cluster manager model)</em> </p> </blockquote> <p>Trust me – an interesting read, and very germane for those wondering what the non-Object/HDFS world of persistence will look like in the container era.</p> <p>Read on!</p> <p> <p>For readers who who are not familiar with the world of these new apps, some foundation is needed.&#160; </p> <p>Unlike traditional apps that are simply virtualized, the new apps are instead designed to be abstracted, sever every possible dependency (even on things like “availability”) and have scale-out application models.&#160;&#160;&#160; </p> <p>For those that live in infrastructure-land, but are intellectually curious about application-land, there’s good reading <a href="http://12factor.net">here</a>.&#160;&#160; In particular, look at the section on “<a href="http://12factor.net/backing-services">Backing Services</a>” – this is really important: </p> <blockquote> <p><em>“The code for a twelve-factor app makes no distinction between local and third party services. To the app, both are attached resources, accessed via a URL or other locator/credentials stored in the config. A deploy of the twelve-factor app should be able to swap out a local MySQL database with one managed by a third party (such as Amazon RDS)”</em></p> </blockquote> <p>In addition, the section on <a href="http://12factor.net/config">config</a> (which highlights the only thing that there needs to be a strict separation of code and config, so use of env variables, or more commonly some form of YAML – aka “yet another markup language” config files are used to be inputs to the code).</p> <p>… This all leads to a container running code which is totally ephemeral.&#160;&#160; Where is the world of persistence in this picture?&#160; Is it needed?</p> <p>Traditional use of containers were very different than VMs in this regard, because their answer to the question above was, for the most part “no”.&#160;&#160; </p> <p>Containers were compute-only for all intents and purpose.&#160; They had limited networking, and VERY limited storage subsystems.&#160; They would have a small filesystem accessible to the container that used a union filesystem (which can be snapshotted).</p> <p>Using persistence that is external to the container, was, well – somewhat verboten, because it would potentially (done badly) create a binding that linked the code to the external service more tightly.</p> <p>Object stores are natural, because they are an “external backing service”, accessed via a URL.&#160;&#160; Bindings were done over a listening port – so again, beautifully isolated.</p> <p>But – people started to push containers into places they hadn’t been before, placing new demands on the networking and storage subsystems.&#160;&#160; </p> <p>An example in networking at DockerCon this year was during the hackathon the effort to add native support to the Docker Engine to have the ability to work with VLANs.&#160;&#160; Our very own EMC{code} guru Clint Kitson was there with a group and did a PR to add Native VLAN support to Docker which you can read up <a href="http://blog.emccode.com/2015/06/22/code-and-hacking-the-dockercon-2015/">here</a>. What I loved about the hackathon was that in 24 hrs, they worked on it, and did a ton of work to ultimately contributing to Docker itself, including proving it out, and building a Docker branch <a href="https://github.com/dockervlan">here</a>.</p> <p>What about examples in transactional storage?&#160;&#160; People started to find all sorts of use cases where accessing some form of external persistence layer that was transactional (low latency, high IOps, tends towards smaller IO patterns) would be useful.&#160;&#160; Very often this would be shared across containers, persist across container instantiation.&#160;&#160; Also often, it would be used to power some element of a data fabric (not uncommonly NoSQL databases).</p> <blockquote> <p><em>Sidebar: Beyond those examples, I’m finding that with each day as people push containers where they weren’t originally contemplated to go – I’m finding people wanting to use them in ways that are MORE like a “kernel mode VM” (including running heavy processes, with a lot of IO needed from a single process) vs. a proper scale-out app.</em></p> <p><em>It’s arguable whether that is good (I would bias to use the right tool for the job – and think this is the human behavior pattern where people SO want to go one way for everything, which ends up silly) – but the upside is that it’s pushing the container ecosystem in all kinds of interesting ways</em>.</p> </blockquote> <p>So why do this?&#160;&#160; Well, as you push containers into a place where they ARE running the database, and if the database needs more than what local storage can give, or use replicas, or any set of data services (dedupe/compression/encryption)…&#160;&#160; Again – there’s a real argument that IF you need these, should you use a container or a kernel mode VM?&#160;&#160; There’s pros and cons, but that’s outside of the scope for this post.</p> <p>There are a couple thoughts on how to do something like this:</p> <ol> <li>Bypass using NFS into the container.&#160;&#160; Tricky because containers out of the box are missing some “guts” to do this, but there are workarounds.&#160;&#160; Justin Parisi from NetApp has a good post on how to do this <a href="https://whyistheinternetbroken.wordpress.com/2015/05/12/techusing-nfs-with-docker-where-does-it-fit-in/">here</a>. </li> <li>Natively.&#160;&#160; The example here would be <a href="https://docs.docker.com/userguide/dockervolumes/">Docker Volumes</a>.&#160;&#160; With underlying NFS mounts or devices to the docker host.&#160;&#160; The analogy for the VMware cognoscenti would be VAAI or VVOLs – <em>but it’s notable that the docker host is missing something to connect it to the external storage itself, it just assumes that it’s “there” and it also has no policy awareness of storage behavior.</em> </li> <li>Via a “plugin”.&#160; The example here <a href="https://clusterhq.com">Flocker</a> – which is an external “volume manager”… Somewhat analagous to the ViPR Controller, and frankly, an interesting thought is whether someone takes the open-source ViPR Controller (CoprHD) and makes it integrate with Docker via a plugin (which is perfectly possible).&#160;&#160; The analogy here for the VMware cognoscenti would the earliest days of VMware where NetApp and EMC (and then everybody) battled it out for the best vCenter Plugin. </li> </ol> <p>Last week, we announced our work on #3 – which was to work with Flocker – which you should check out <a href="https://clusterhq.com">here</a>.&#160;&#160; Now, it’s important to understand, this is REALLY moving fast, and is new.&#160;&#160; For crying out loud, plugins to the Docker Engine itself are news this week in the <a href="https://blog.docker.com/2015/06/announcing-docker-1-7-multi-host-networking-plugins-and-orchestration-updates/">Docker 1.7 experimental release as part of the core Docker Engine</a>.&#160;&#160; This is really cool.&#160; It means you can use Flocker with AWS EBS if your containers are running on EC2, EMC ScaleIO and XtremIO if it’s not.&#160;&#160; The code is on EMC{code} here, and you can get to the <a href="https://github.com/emccorp/scaleio-flocker-driver">Flocker ScaleIO github repo here</a>, and the <a href="https://github.com/emccorp/xtremio-flocker-driver">XtremIO github repo here</a>.&#160;&#160; Of course, for EMC ScaleIO and XtremIO customers this is gratis, and a bonus of having the best transactional SDS and AFA on the market :-) For others, there’s also a cinder plugin that may work more generally.&#160;&#160; What I love about this is that it’s an example of real customer involvement in innovation – in this case Swisscom, a cool shop to be sure – and <a href="https://clusterhq.com/2015/06/17/emc-partnership/">here’s the shared story</a>.</p> <blockquote> <p><em>Sidebar: just like the Networking example I noted above, the same “Native” vs. “Plugin” thing exists in the networking domain.&#160; The Docker 1.7 experimental release has a pluggable network framework for the big SDN stacks to provide their overlay services into the Docker ecosystem.</em></p> </blockquote> <p>Want a better way to understand – here’s Flocker in action, first with ScaleIO and then with XtremIO.</p> <p><iframe height="240" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ufSbF0-pk_Q?list=PLbssOJyyvHuWiBQAg9EFWH570timj2fxt" frameborder="0" width="426" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> <p><iframe height="240" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QKwNWTEE6hA?list=PLbssOJyyvHuWiBQAg9EFWH570timj2fxt" frameborder="0" width="426" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p> <p>What about #2 – the “Native” route?&#160;&#160; Well, EMC has been contributing there also.&#160;&#160; It’s not clear whether people will tend to prefer the “plugin” route, or the “native route” – but experience on Linux, Cloud Foundry, Hadoop and other projects show that core contribution is an important part of being part of the eventual answer. </p> <p>To some degree, the “Plugin” approach and the “Native” can be competitive – since in essence they are two different ways to get to the same point (in this case, presenting and consuming transactional persistent storage within containers, and having the configuration persist as container restarts occur, and doing it in a way that doesn’t break the “12-factor” rules of proper abstraction and configuration management).</p> <p>Now, the Docker Engine has had a <a href="https://docs.docker.com/userguide/dockervolumes/">volume capability</a> for a while – which is important because it enables persistence that bypasses the Union Filesystem, and persists even if the docker container is nuked.&#160;&#160; What there isn’t is an equivalent ideal to the SPBM/VVOL idea in vSphere – there’s nothing that provides behavior and management at the docker host level.&#160;&#160; This is the purpose of Project Rex-Ray.&#160;&#160; You can read up on it <a href="http://blog.emccode.com/2015/04/30/dogged-ly-pursuing-persistent-data-for-containers-with-rex-ray/">here</a>, and the <a href="https://github.com/emccode/rexray">github repo is here</a> – and like all things EMC that are open source “glue code”, you can get it at <a href="http://emccode.github.io">EMC{code}</a>.</p> <blockquote> <p><em>Now, even to me, it’s debatable – that ViPR/CoprHD performs this similar function.&#160;&#160; Shouldn’t they do this?&#160;&#160; Answer: a) never would have happened until we open-sourced ViPR, which we have now; b) ViPR is a lot more feature rich, but also a lot more heavy – can we make it light enough; c) do container engines/cluster managers WANT the extra stuff ViPR/CoprHD provides; d) ViPR/CoprHD is written in Java vs. Rex-Ray is in Go, the native language of most container engines/cluster managers – shouldn’t matter, but it does :-)&#160;&#160; The joy of open-source is that hey – let’s do both, and see what works best and the community digs! :-)</em></p> </blockquote> <p>As always, a demo is worth 1000 words :-)</p> <p>Project Rex-Ray </p> <iframe height="240" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rF8Bc3HZnAU?list=PLbssOJyyvHuWiBQAg9EFWH570timj2fxt" frameborder="0" width="426" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe> <p>Cool, eh?</p> <p>Here are the takeaways for me at least:</p> <ol> <li>Docker is maturing (plugins) and the ecosystem including Flocker and EMC are embracing. </li> <li>Just like every ecosystem I’ve ever seen – there’s always a natural tension between “do it native” and “extend via simple extensibilty” (in this case, Native vs. Plugin). </li> <li>Transactional Persistence is an emerging space for containers.&#160;&#160; EMC is ALL OVER IT.&#160;&#160; Frankly – I’m not aware of anything like this in terms of real code, real contribution.&#160;&#160; If you’re a ScaleIO or XtremIO customer – you have to be thinking “this is cool stuff” </li> <li>We think things like ScaleIO (SDS transactional stacks) and XtremIO (modern AFAs) will be the underpinning… </li> <li>… but aren’t stopping there – you can imagine DSSD intersection with some of these modern scale-out NoSQL databases, KV stores, and in-memory databases.&#160;&#160; Expect Rex-Ray to expand there :-) </li> </ol> <p><strong><em>So – what do YOU think of this?&#160;&#160; Does transactional persistence need to strengthen in the container ecosystem?&#160; Which way – Native/Plugin?</em></strong></p></p>Chad Sakac2015-06-23T08:46:12-04:00Container Persistence Part 1: State of the Art of Object Storeshttp://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/06/container-persistence-part-1-state-of-the-art-of-object-stores.html
[updated June 24th, 11:10am ET – minor typo fixes, one technical catch, fixed links] DockerCon is going on today and tomorrow – and no better time to put out some new great tools for people using Containers. This will be...<p><strong>[updated June 24th, 11:10am ET – minor typo fixes, one technical catch, fixed links]</strong></p> <p><a href="http://www.dockercon.com">DockerCon</a> is going on today and tomorrow – and no better time to put out some new great tools for people using Containers.</p> <p>This will be a 3 part post – and timed intentionally with DockerCon.&#160; Why?&#160;&#160;&#160; Well – containers are indeed the buzz du jour, and while the ecosystem is still very vibrant (far from settled, with lots of battles being fought), DockerCon has become a critical time for the ecosystem to get together and collaborate.</p> <p>Containers and persistence – what’s the scoop?</p> <p>A lot of strange new ideas for people used to NAS, SAN, and VVOLS :-)</p> <p>Object stores tend to be the dominant persistence model for people building apps using containers – but there is emergent work around Flocker and other things for other forms of persistence (parts 2 and part 3).&#160;&#160; </p> <p>Frankly, developers generally they don’t think about “persistence” beyond the data layer.&#160; “Data Layer” is not what people think of as “storage”, but more like “RDBMS” in traditional apps – where an app writes something with an expectation it will persist.&#160;&#160; In modern “12-factor” apps (sometimes called “platform 3” apps), the data layer is a “polyglot persistence” layer (which is a terrible way to say “multiple languages of persistence”) – consisting of a composite of in-memory DBs, Key-Value stores, scale-out NoSQL models, MapReduce.&#160;&#160;&#160; These all which in turn depend on transactional storage models – more on that in part 2 and 3.&#160;&#160; The other form of “persistence” developers use are<strong><em>object stores.</em></strong></p> <p>So – what’s the news?&#160;&#160; Well, Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) 2.0 is out now, and available for free and frictionless download – <strong><em>I would encourage you to ignore the rest of my post, download it, and try it for yourself</em></strong> here if you like binaries. <a href="http://www.emc.com/getECS">http://www.emc.com/getECS</a>.&#160;&#160; It’s also in the <a href="http://hub.docker.com">Docker Hub</a> if you prefer the Docker marketplace.&#160;&#160; If you want to be like the cool kids and love a git clone, the <a href="https://github.com/EMCECS/ECS-CommunityEdition">github repo is here</a> (for single and multiple node configurations)&#160; Give it a whirl :-)</p> <blockquote> <p>Here at EMC, we’re really getting into this “make access to our software IP easy” thing, and there is a pattern: /getECS, /getScaleIO, /getIsilon -&#160; “get it?” :-)&#160;&#160; I’m trying to guide our sales teams to back away slowly – this isn’t a case of “let me give you a huge powerpoint”, but rather – guide a customer on access, use, and answering questions.</p> </blockquote> <p>Elastic Cloud Storage is EMC’s premiere, modern and “designed from the ground up” object store.&#160;&#160; </p> <p>In a sense, we’ve been at the Object storage business for a looong time.&#160;&#160;&#160; Way back in the day (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMC_Atmos">2008</a>) – EMC released the first release of Atmos, which was our first geo-distributed, cloud scale object store.&#160;&#160; The architects cut their teeth on OceanStore at Berkley.&#160;&#160; Atmos is now used around the world with many, many PB-EB scale deployments.</p> <p>It’s funny – while so much talk in the storage world centers around the battle-ground for “platform 2 transactional storage (think of all the poop flinging in the AFA battles) – the world of object stores is more quiet.&#160; People just use them without fighting.&#160;&#160; I think it’s because there’s less revenue being fought over.</p> <p>That said – object stores are part of the fabric of our lives every day – and underpin all modern apps we use, whether they use Atmos, AWS S3, the Azure blob store, a Swift or Ceph variant.</p> <p><em>This stuff is all around us all the time - in fact, I would wager that many of us, at some point in the day, dear reader, you will use an Atmos-based object store without even knowing it</em>.&#160;&#160; </p> <p>While I wouldn’t call it “an object store”, Centera is an object store architecturally&#160;&#160; It’s an object store designed for compliance use cases, and the CAS API .</p> <p>Now, EMC has been at the world of Object Stores for a long time – but when you build something, you learn a lot – and sometimes those lessons are hard (because they are deeply wrapped into the architecture).</p> <p>In 2011, Amitabh Shrivistava and Manuvir Das joined EMC from Microsoft – where they learnt hard lessons in helping build the earliest forms of Azure.&#160;&#160; Based on that experience – they wanted to build an open storage policy abstractor/automation tool (which became ViPR and the open-source trunk, <a href="http://coprhd.github.io/">CoprHD</a>), and a next-generation geo-distributed object store – Elastic Cloud Storage.</p> <p><a href="http://www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h13518-ecs-technical-architecture-wp.pdf"><img title="image" style="border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; border-left: 0px; display: inline; margin-right: 0px" border="0" alt="image" src="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301bb0848018b970d-pi" width="206" align="right" height="260" /></a>ECS 2.0 has going for it several things that we think make it the world’s best object store (details in the whitepaper, click to get it):</p> <ul> <li>Scales out the ying-yang.&#160;&#160; Think many billions of objects, easily. </li> <li>Performs great across a broad band of object sizes – and at huge scale.&#160;&#160; With other object store implementations - object ingest and read/write rates vary wildly from small objects to massive blobs, and also wildly vary with scale. </li> <li>Rich Geo-dispersion – which is important for cost and scaling.&#160;&#160; Most modern object stores use an erasure coding (vs. mirroring) approach.&#160; ECS uses a technique which asymptotically approaches ~1.5x efficiency (1.6x at 6 sites) </li> <li>Strong consistency.&#160;&#160; Object stores (unlike NAS and block POSIX storage stacks that consider consistency an inviolable design requirement) have varying forms of consistency.&#160;&#160; Loose consistency means that the app developer would need to build logic to “check” that they actually got what they asked for.&#160;&#160; Complete consistency is what most people expect – but is generally a trade-off with geo-distribution.&#160;&#160; ECS 2.0 has a strong consistency model (you always get what you ask for), but also implements geo-distribution via a novel approach. </li> <li>Open API layer.&#160;&#160; With a really modular northbound API layer that is very decoupled from the chunk-management layer, ECS can support a broad set of northbound APIs.&#160; ECS supports a superset of S3, Atmos, Swift APIs, and a subset (still missing compliance) of the Centera CAS APIs today.&#160;&#160; In fact, with ECS 2.0, we really think we can cover the vast, vast majority of Atmos use cases with ECS (Atmos “3.0” is in effect ECS - “Atmos is dead, long live Atmos” :-)&#160;&#160;&#160; But, ECS can also support HDFS via a custom libHDFS, and in the future, we will add NFS for people who want a file handle for and object occassionally.&#160;&#160; This isn’t a different “pool” on the same thing – each of the protocols accesses the same content, without moving or copying it – handy.&#160;&#160; [added 6/24 - one note – while not a inherent limitation, the current access layer of the stack enables object + HDFS access to the same object, but not simultaneous through two object APIs like Atmos API and S3 API simultaneusly – we have a customer looking for that, and are evaluating adding that capability].</li> <li>ECS Built on a container-driven model, with a unique stateful container management bit of code.&#160;&#160; This is a neat little thing.&#160; Things like Kubernetes, Mesos, and the CF Run-time management layer are all “cluster managers” (managing the container/VM abstraction units, monitoring health, and taking action).&#160;&#160; However, most of these don’t have a rich set of semantics for the relationships/dependencies of containers.&#160;&#160; Ergo they go “hey, this container/VM is dead… oh, well, restart it wherever the resource manager says there’s balanced capacity”.&#160;&#160; For object stores – that doesn’t work, because state matters – you don’t want to restart part of the object store on the same server/rack/data center as another part based on the geo-dispersion/erasure coding logic.&#160;&#160;&#160; More on this tomorrow in Part 2 and Part 3 - it’s interesting as the container ecosystem starts to tackle persistent use cases in addition to the ephemeral things they focus on today, they are starting to add not only persistence, but tackling questions of rich hand-shakes/state management in the cluster managers.&#160;&#160; Frankly, I’m pushing that we should open-source some of the cool stuff that we’ve built here – and use it to contribute to the cluster manager ecosystem. </li> </ul> <p>BTW – a little side-bar on that last bullet (our investment into container and container management) from Manuvir…</p> <blockquote> <p><em>“EMC bet on containers (and more specifically Docker) before it was cool :-) - by building ECS from the ground up on Docker 0.1 and trusting that Docker would come around in time, which it has. Every box of ECS we ship has ECS running in Docker containers. Has been so from day one. The Dockerized ECS we are making available is exactly the same set of binaries we run inside our appliance. Docker is in the DNA of ECS. Which other storage system can claim this? Who else is on a path to run 100PB+ production data on Docker in 2015?&quot;</em></p> <p><em>I’ll add that containerization is at the heart of HYPERMAX on VMAX3 and the code that brings VNXe into such a powerful, small package.</em></p> </blockquote> <p>ECS 1.0 and 1.1 were deployed at many customers, and 2.0 firms up a ton (including critical site failure behavior, rack topology handling, object/bucket auditing, reporting/management) – and we think this is ready for a ton to be thrown at it.</p> <p>Now, I’m sure that many of you will be skeptical.&#160; Competitive Object Stores will surely disagree, but we think we have something superior to any of the object stacks out there.&#160; <strong><em>The joy of software being easily and freely available means you don’t need to take my word for it.&#160;&#160; Download.&#160; Give it a shot. It’s easy:</em></strong>&#160; <a href="http://www.emc.com/getECS">www.emc.com/getECS</a> </p> <p>Now, ECS comes as full-software only form (and our most monstrous deployments tend to require that).&#160;&#160; Of course, when customers want support for the ECS software stack from EMC, they would license the software and pay support.&#160; </p> <p>But, it also comes in appliance form (bundled with commodity hardware for an integrated software/hardware support model)*.&#160;&#160; This tends, in my experience – to be desired consumption model except for the truly hyper-scale customers.&#160;&#160; ALL customers WANT the flexibility of the hardware layer.&#160; MOST however, end up wanting a single accountable party to support the whole “hardware/software” stack.</p> <blockquote> <p>*I agree Chris Mellor @ El Reg when he rails at the storage ecosystem “SDS-washing” things <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/09/kill_meaningless_concept_sw_defined_storage/">here</a> (in fact I commented).&#160;&#160; That said – the concept of persistence software-only storage stacks is a real thing customers want, and VERY frequently strangely in the form of bundled appliances (I talked about the “why” of that based on my experience <a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/03/is-the-dress-white-and-gold-or-blue-and-black-sds-server-or-appliance.html">here</a>).</p> </blockquote> <p>The ECS appliance looks like the below.&#160;&#160; We’ll keep iterating on the hardware, but it already is an incredibly dense package.</p> <p><a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b7c7a27f3f970b-pi"><img title="image" style="border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px" border="0" alt="image" src="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b8d12be657970c-pi" width="591" height="331" /></a> </p> <p>Welcome to the world ECS 2.0!&#160; I can’t wait to see how customers will use you – and would love your feedback (positive/negative, bring it on! :-)</p> <p>Post #2 (Containers and transactional persistence, Flocker, RexRay, ScaleIO) and #3 (more on Caspian) I’ll post tomorrow…</p>Chad Sakac2015-06-22T08:17:43-04:00Now THIS is commitment to a gag :-)http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/06/now-this-is-commitment-to-a-gag-.html
Has been a really, REALLY busy (but awesome) week with the EMC team, the EMC Partners, and most importantly customers in Brazil. Sao Paulo and Rio are amazing places – and lots of great people. Completely spent. Working furiously on...<p>Has been a really, REALLY busy (but awesome) week with the EMC team, the EMC Partners, and most importantly customers in Brazil.&#160; Sao Paulo and Rio are amazing places – and lots of great people.&#160;&#160; Completely spent.</p> <p>Working furiously on some big technical blog posts for Dockercon next week…</p> <p>At the airport, saw this come in from the Nordics, and had to share.&#160;&#160; THAT is commitment – ALL IN :-)&#160;&#160; Talented too :-) </p> <p>Now there are several awesome thing about ViPR:</p> <ol> <li>Open Source (GitHub Repo <a href="http://coprhd.github.io">here</a>!) </li> <li>It’s a great “simplifier” for all sorts of customers. </li> <li>This absolutely ridiculous (and awesome) full on commit by the local team in the Nordics :-) </li> </ol> <p>World, if you are ready… “License to ViPR”</p> <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0D4sBKVYhw&amp;feature=youtu.be"><img title="image" style="border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px" border="0" alt="image" src="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b8d12a4801970c-pi" width="495" height="272" /></a></p>Chad Sakac2015-06-18T17:19:57-04:00Happy Pride Month!http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/06/happy-pride-month.html
This is not a tech post, and it’s a personal post. I always am quick to remind people, while it’s impossible to fully “separate” work and personal personas (after all, we are all each ONE person :-) Virtual Geek is...<p>This is not a tech post, and it’s a personal post.&#160; I always am quick to remind people, while it’s impossible to fully “separate” work and personal personas (after all, we are all each ONE person :-) Virtual Geek is a personal blog, and the words I write are mine and mine alone.</p> <p>I’m one of the two exec sponsors for EMC’s LGBT Association (along with my friend and colleague Kathrin Winkler who also leads EMC’s sustainability efforts), and it’s Pride Month – and I wanted to share publicly the internal message we posted.&#160; </p> <p>I really deeply, personally believe in the principle of treasuring diversity in all forms.&#160;&#160; I believe it makes a society, a team stronger – just like biodiversity makes an ecosystem stronger.&#160; Likewise, homogenous/non-diverse ecosystems are fragile, and struggle to deal with change.&#160;&#160; </p> <p>Also, respect for diversity is principle is somewhat like freedom of speech – I respect the principle of diversity such that I respect the diverse views of people that disagree with me, and me with them, and I will fight vigorously for their right to disagree with me (within the bounds of the law of course).</p> <p>I’m proud of the clear position the company took on the recent situation in Indiana and Texas.&#160;&#160; Change happens slowly, then all at once.</p> <p>-------------------------------</p> <p>As executive sponsors of ELGBTA, EMC's employee circle for allies of our LGBT friends and family, it is our pleasure to welcome all EMC staff to the start of Pride Month 2015!</p> <p> <br />Pride Month is celebrated each year to recognize the impact that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals have had locally, nationally, and internationally. At locations around the world, Pride activities are often held in June to mark turning points in LGBT history, such as the Stonewall Riots in the U.S., leading to organized efforts to confront and challenge discrimination.</p> <p> <br />At EMC, Pride Month means even more.&#160; Diversity of thought, diversity of experience – <strong><em>frankly diversity in all forms</em></strong> – is critical everywhere, certainly at EMC.</p> <p> <br />Pride Month is a time for conscious celebration of who we each are as individuals.&#160; Pride month is a time for reflection of what <strong><u>we each uniquely</u></strong> bring to enrich our teams, families, community and EMC as a company.&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; <br /></p> <p>We both think that this reflection and celebration is something that holds true for all of us - regardless of race, gender, religion, nationality, sexual preference or identity, age, or physical ability.&#160; And it is an opportunity for us to take time out to honor our common shared sense of decency, purpose, and humanity.</p> <p> <br />We are incredibly proud of being part of a global EMC community that knows diversity makes our company stronger by feeding innovation and giving us a deeper understanding of our customers and business partners. Even more, it broadens our own perspectives as individuals and expands our appreciation for our teammates.&#160; We are especially proud this year of the public stance that EMC has taken in favor of LGBT rights and non-discrimination for all of our employees.&#160; <br /></p> <p>Activities in honor of Pride Month will be announced on Inside EMC, and on the ELGBTA mailing list, which is open to all. Keep an eye out for events in your local office.&#160; <br /></p> <p>Additionally, we're excited to announce that EMC will be sponsoring Pride Parades in Boston on June 13, in London on June 27, and in Seattle on June 28. Our theme this year is &quot;Embrace&quot;; a reminder to embrace our differences, and our opportunities. We will be there, shouting our pride in being part of the EMC community, and we hope you'll be marching with us. Let's make this a record turnout! <br /></p> <p>Pride is not something we feel only for one month per year. We feel it every day when we look at our amazing colleagues and what we have achieved as a company.&#160; Let's use this month as a reminder and an opportunity celebrate diversity and to bring our voices together to say thank you!</p> <p><a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b8d121bd17970c-pi"><img title="image" style="border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; float: none; margin-left: auto; display: block; border-top-width: 0px; margin-right: auto" border="0" alt="image" src="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b8d121bd1b970c-pi" width="437" height="164" /></a></p>Chad Sakac2015-06-03T23:36:03-04:00ScaleIO free and frictionless access &ndash; what are YOU going to do?http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/06/scaleio-free-and-frictionless-access-what-are-you-going-to-do.html
As promised at EMC World, ScaleIO is now available freely, and frictionlessly. No feature reduction, no time limits, no forms to fill out. Just an amazingly simple, well-engineered, scalable transactional SDS stack. Navigate to http://www.emc.com/scaleIO or click on the below...<p>As promised at EMC World, ScaleIO is now available freely, and frictionlessly.&#160;&#160; No feature reduction, no time limits, no forms to fill out.&#160;&#160; Just an amazingly simple, well-engineered, scalable transactional SDS stack.&#160;&#160; Navigate to <a href="http://www.emc.com/scaleIO">http://www.emc.com/scaleIO</a> or click on the below – it’s that easy.</p> <p><a href="http://www.emc.com/scaleio"><img title="image" style="border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; display: inline" border="0" alt="image" src="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b7c796c4b8970b-pi" width="620" height="258" /></a> </p> <p>While people started by augering in on the VSAN/ScaleIO comparison, we see ScaleIO being deployed for the most part where VSAN is not a target:</p> <ul> <li>Linux-based IaaS Cloud stacks in enterprises and service providers.</li> <li>Enterprise IaaS cloud stacks which tend towards “open abstraction layer” (vSphere, Windows/Hyper-V, KVM, also storage for physical hosts like Oracle RAC clusters/containers on bare-metal).</li> <li>Deployments that have scales in many tens to hundreds (or even thousands) of nodes participating</li> <li>Deployments that vary from fully hyperconverged compute/persistence to fully disparate two-tier architectures (dense memory/compute blades connected to dense rack mount nodes for persistence)</li> <li>Deployments that vary from “capacity optimized” (crazy dense GB/RU/$) to performance optimized (millions of IOps per rack, latencies in the 1500 usec to 700 usec bands)</li> <li>… and yes, sometimes, cases where it’s vSphere only – where customers want an alternative to VSAN (which is also great for that use case) for what ever reason.</li> </ul> <p>No, it’s not an “all dancing/all singing” SDS stack – but as Virtual Geek readers know by now, I don’t think there’s ANY persistence stack that aims to “do it all” that does it very well.&#160;&#160; What ScaleIO is simple: it is a lean, mean, feature-rich transactional (read low latency, high IOps) scale-out to infinity and beyond storage stack.&#160; It given enough nodes, or strong enough nodes, it can chew up and spit out any transactional workload.</p> <p>No – it doesn’t have the crazy flat latency curves and distributed inline dedupe behavior of tightly-coupled clusters like XtremIO, but at scale, it’s really quite something.</p> <p><strong><em>Since it can be deployed on almost anything, use cases are really only limited by one’s imagination.</em></strong>&#160;&#160; Already, funky scenarios are starting to pop up – this is one of my favorite, because it’s weird :-)&#160;&#160; <a title="https://community.emc.com/blogs/bottk/2015/05/29/doing-30000-iops-on-azure-a3-machine-using-scaleio" href="https://community.emc.com/blogs/bottk/2015/05/29/doing-30000-iops-on-azure-a3-machine-using-scaleio">https://community.emc.com/blogs/bottk/2015/05/29/doing-30000-iops-on-azure-a3-machine-using-scaleio</a></p> <p>In 20 minutes, a non-expert (though Karsten’s pretty awesome) created an install running in Azure on A3 VMs, doing about 30,000 IOps.</p> <p><strong><em>What crazy thing will YOU do?</em></strong></p> <p>Now – judging from the internal threads I’m looking at, there will be some very predictable questions:</p> <ul> <li>Q: Can I use it in production environments?&#160;&#160; </li> <li>A: No, not really.&#160;&#160; People, it has best-effort only community support.&#160;&#160; Don’t be silly.&#160;&#160; EMC isn’t going to police this, but don’t expect us to provide support.&#160; If you DO call in support – there’s a clause in the EULA which we will point out.&#160;&#160; We went back and forth on whether to include this – know why it’s in there?&#160;&#160; In the run up to this we started to get all sorts of silly questions (“can I buy a small amount for something secondary, and then use the free version for the main thing I actually want it for – and then call in support on the small thing?”).&#160; People this is a model that is well understood – don’t try to be sneaky.&#160;&#160; If you will NEVER CALL IN SUPPORT – whatevs.</li> <li>Q: Can I use the free and frictionless download and then “upgrade” to the licensed production version later?</li> <li>A: Yes. Once you decide to move to a ScaleIO production license and the associated maintenance / support – just contact EMC or your EMC partner, and we will assist you in purchasing a license for your system.</li> <li>Q (variation 1): Can I use the free and frictionless download and then purchase support from EMC at a later date?&#160;&#160; </li> <li>Q (variation 2): Is there a pay for “Support only” model?</li> <li>A: Sort of – but not “support only”.&#160;&#160; Once you decide to go to production and get ScaleIO support, you must acquire a license for the capacity you’re using (or plan to use) and that will also include support.</li> </ul> <p><strong><em>Would LOVE to see the crazy things you come up with now that you have access.&#160; Compare it with your existing array, compare it with whatever you want!&#160;&#160; Come back, and post a link to your hijinks!</em></strong></p>Chad Sakac2015-06-01T16:11:05-04:00Beauty in the &ldquo;The Beast&rdquo;http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/05/beauty-in-the-the-beast.html
There’s no doubt IMO that we overdid it at EMC World with all the “Beast” theme when talking about XtremIO 4.0. You could tell that YES, there was a bit of “proud parent” dynamic… … And YES, we have a...<p><a href="http://idcdocserv.com/252304e_EMC"><img title="image" style="border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; border-left: 0px; display: inline" border="0" alt="image" src="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b7c790ae46970b-pi" width="198" align="right" height="251" /></a><a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b7c790ae50970b-pi"><img title="image" style="border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-left: 0px; display: inline" border="0" alt="image" src="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301bb0834b2c6970d-pi" width="91" align="left" height="256" /></a>There’s no doubt IMO that we overdid it at EMC World with all the “Beast” theme when talking about XtremIO 4.0.&#160;&#160; </p> <p>You could tell that YES, there was a bit of “proud parent” dynamic…</p> <p>… And YES, we have a ton of install base data (on data reduction rates, on durability, availability and more <a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/05/emc-world-day-1-xtremio-40-the-best-afa-gets-better.html">here</a>)…</p> <p>… And, yes, it is a monster in a sense – packing a lot of punch in an amazing package in the 4.0 software update and the new more dense package.</p> <p>…&#160; And yes, customers are <strong><em>indisputably</em></strong> voting with their feet and their dollars – IDC published their “Worldwide All-Flash Array 2014-2018 and 1H14 Vendor Shares” doc.&#160;&#160; We’ve gotten the rights to republish sections – click on the link to the right.&#160;&#160; If you want the full doc, it’s <a href="http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=252304">here</a>, but you’ll need to get it from IDC.</p> <p><strong><em>… But then I looked at the customers below, and realized, I totally missed the main point – watch it, then read on…</em></strong></p> <p><a href="http://www.emc.com/storage/xtremio/enterprise-solutions.htm?vid=3933795319001"><img title="image" style="border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; float: none; margin-left: auto; border-left: 0px; display: block; margin-right: auto" border="0" alt="image" src="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b8d11a40a8970c-pi" width="453" height="252" /></a>The voice of the customer is much more powerful.&#160;&#160; Listen to those words. </p> <p><strong><em>The point they reminded me of is that XtremIO is a “Beauty”, <u>AND</u> a “Beast”.</em></strong></p> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" width="600" border="2"><tbody> <tr> <td valign="top" width="200"> <p align="center"><strong>New XtremIO 4.0 goodies</strong></p> </td> <td valign="top" width="201"><a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301bb0834b2dc970d-pi"><img title="image" style="border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; float: none; margin-left: auto; border-left: 0px; display: block; margin-right: auto" border="0" alt="image" src="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b7c790ae65970b-pi" width="119" height="119" /></a> </td> <td valign="top" width="199"><a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301bb0834b2e5970d-pi"><img title="image" style="border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; float: none; margin-left: auto; border-left: 0px; display: block; margin-right: auto" border="0" alt="image" src="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b7c790ae6d970b-pi" width="117" height="121" /></a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="200"><strong>Performance economics</strong></td> <td valign="top" width="201">Simple.&#160; Fast.&#160; Always.&#160; Period.&#160; “The easy button”.</td> <td valign="top" width="199">BRUTALLY FAST – consistent sub 1ms latencies, loaded to the gills, all features working (including the new remote replication) – and with the new scale-out limits increased – an easy 1M IOps – not in a fake workload designed to maximize results, but to reflect as close to real world, loaded with data, and with all features in use. </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="200"><strong>Capacity economics</strong></td> <td valign="top" width="201">Dense 40TB X-Bricks coupled with always inline data reduction you can bank on = great $/GB for broad sets of workloads – anything transactional.</td> <td valign="top" width="199">1.6TB eMLC SSDs coupled with the new monster 40TB X-Bricks = we’re continuing to ride the NAND curve, and yes, if you look at the durability data I published <a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/05/emc-world-day-1-xtremio-40-the-best-afa-gets-better.html">here</a> which show that no customer has less than 20 years left of wear – you bet we can use even denser, lower cost NAND thanks to industry leading write amplification avoidance.</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="200">Features</td> <td valign="top" width="201">There is nothing simpler than XtremIO, and the features are just “there” and work.&#160; It’s easy.</td> <td valign="top" width="199">Crazy-rich snapshots, remote replicas, consistency groups, RPOs in the sub 60 second ranges, able to cope with huge change rates.&#160; Improved resiliency.&#160; Data Reduction that is inline, all the time – because of in-memory mapped metadata – in a scale-out design.</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="200"><strong>Scaling</strong></td> <td valign="top" width="201">Starts SMALL.&#160; 3TB.&#160; Scales out so scales as you need.</td> <td valign="top" width="199">8 X-Bricks with 40TB each is a 1PB (with data reduction) in a single “array”, and single floor tile.&#160;&#160; Scales like a mofo.&#160;&#160; And it’s real scale-out: every IO can be served by every X-Brick, with a fully utilized active-active end-to-end system design.</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="200"><strong>Inline, all the time.</strong></td> <td valign="top" width="201">Shouldn’t features work like this?&#160; Always on, always inline – they just “are” in the same way that the sky is blue.</td> <td valign="top" width="199">All data services are inline, all-the time.&#160; Thin provisioning, deduplication, compression, data-at-rest encryption – all happening on a per I/O basis without fail.</td> </tr> </tbody></table> <p></p> <p></p> <p></p> <p>To some – they admire “beastliness”.&#160; Others admire “beauty”.&#160; There is of course – the rare times where something is BOTH beauty and the beast.</p> <p><a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b7c790ae72970b-pi"><img title="image" style="border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; border-left: 0px; display: inline" border="0" alt="image" src="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301bb0834b2ef970d-pi" width="180" align="left" height="240" /></a> </p> <p></p> <p></p> <p></p> <p></p> <p></p> <p></p> <p></p> <p>Last week I was in St. Louis – visiting a ton of great customers, and also speaking at a EMC/VMware sponsored Women’s Leadership Forum (incredible panel!).&#160;&#160; </p> <p>I ALSO visited World Wide Technologies (WWT) – an amazing EMC (and VMware, and Cisco, and a huge long list) partner.</p> <p>They have an Advanced Technology Center which is amazing.&#160; They can support real PoCs with customer’s real workloads – and due to their partner ecosystem – it’s not just one vendor – they can literally assemble almost ANY PoC combo.</p> <p>Here’s a picture of XtremIO in their ATC, and while 4.0 doesn’t GA until the end of June – they already have the bits (and have been helping us through the beta).&#160; </p> <p>I framed the picture this way because beside it there are XtremIO’s competitors (our partners work in an open ecosystem) – and I don’t want to get our great partner in any trouble.</p> <p>But – if you want to put us (and others) through their paces – don’t listen to me.&#160;&#160; Give it a shot.&#160;&#160; Reach out to WWT and&#160; <strong><em>You’ll see what I’m talking about – XtremIO 4.0 is a beast indeed – but simple, starts small, and is beautiful.</em></strong></p> <p><strong><em>As always – comments welcome!</em></strong></p>Chad Sakac2015-05-26T14:59:51-04:00EMC and Virtustream &ndash; what&rsquo;s up with that?!http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/05/emc-and-virtustream-whats-up-with-that.html
Today, EMC announced the acquisition of privately held Virtustream (see info here) At the most important level, it’s a recognition that people want their technology in new, simpler consumption models – and that it’s not ONE model that wins –...<p>Today, EMC announced the acquisition of privately held Virtustream (see info <a href="http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2015/20150526-01.htm">here</a>)</p> <p><strong>At the most important level, it’s a recognition that people want their technology in new, simpler consumption models – and that it’s not ONE model that wins – but rather multiple variations on the theme for different customers, and different workloads.</strong></p> <p><strong><u>1. The success of public cloud is a first proof point.</u></strong>&#160;&#160; After all – look at the recent public results of AWS and Azure.&#160; I personally wasn’t surprised by their revenue and growth rates – but was by their profitability (which highlights it’s not about hyper-scale economics, but rather their great operational model).&#160;&#160; The growth in the public cloud is why it’s so important to us strategically to a) embrace all the public clouds using things like Cloud Foundry, and enabling our customers to use AWS Direct Connect, Azure Express Route to leverage their elasticity coupled with the things EMC provides; b) provide alternative public clouds that are incredibly well mated with people’s on premises private clouds - <em>Hence vCloud Air and the vCloud Air Network partner ecosystem elements of the strategy at the Federation level.&#160; BTW – Bill Fathers blog <a href="http://blogs.vmware.com/tribalknowledge/2015/05/bill-fathers-vcloud-air.html">here</a> has lots of perspectives worth reading – particularly because Virtustream is a member of the vCloud Air Network!</em></p> <p><strong><u>2. The success of on premises private clouds, and the easiest way to deploy them – converged and hyper-converged infrastructure is a second proof point.</u></strong>&#160;&#160; Even with the incredible growth in public cloud IaaS models, the amount of dollars being spent in making on-premises infrastructure work better is multiples higher.&#160;&#160; I’m no analyst, but the reasons I hear from customers range broadly – from economic considerations, to information providence, to data gravity, to.. well, frankly control issues (this last one is real, if not logical or correct).&#160;&#160; Often, this demand is particularly strong for workloads that are <strong>NOT</strong> “12 Factor Apps” (read <a href="http://12factor.net">here</a>)/“Platform 3 apps” – but instead the “legacy” Platform 2 app stacks – with all their tight SLA and infrastructure coupling.&#160;&#160; I’m not saying that these infrastructure dependencies are a good thing – but sometimes the only way to break that coupling is to completely re-write the app – and sometimes that’s just not possible (or a priority).&#160;&#160; <em>People want their on-premise private clouds to be able to run similar workloads off-premises, and continued investment in technologies that bridge the two.&#160;&#160; Hence the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, Vblock, VxBlock, VxRack, and VSPEX Blue elements of the strategy at the Federation level – as well as the whole best-of-breed component technologies in the Federation.</em></p> <p>I was listening to a recent Cloudcast (a great podcast BTW – <a href="http://www.thecloudcast.net">check it out</a>) episode - #189 to be precise – and Aaron Delp made a comment that “greenfield and brownfield are both important, but the bulk of the revenue is in brownfield”.&#160;&#160; I think both are important.&#160;&#160; Greenfield is invariably where you an make quantum leaps, brownfield is what keeps the lights on.</p> <p>You can see how EMC, and VMware keep strengthening and double down on BOTH 1 (ScaleIO, ECS, vCloud Air networking capabilities/locations/services, Photon/Lightwave) and on 2 (vSphere 6, XtremIO, etc), and Pivotal continuing to embrace both models of infrastructure in support of their container management and PaaS platforms with Cloud Foundry, Lattice/Diego and more.&#160;&#160; </p> <p>It’s very notable that in each case, there is a route to market that is <strong><u>BOTH</u></strong> direct and through a partner ecosystem.&#160; </p> <p><strong><em><u>… But, something was missing.</u></em></strong></p> <p>In the first proof point (public cloud) – the public cloud model delivers a simple model, one where someone else runs the infrastructure.&#160;&#160; Very often, the economic model is more OPEX-oriented.&#160;&#160; But – in general (even with vCloud Air – arguably the public cloud “most well suited for your existing apps”), you live within the parameters of the public cloud offers – and <strong><em>in general, they are not suited to the mass of existing enterprise apps.&#160;&#160; Hence – best applicability to greenfield.</em></strong></p> <p>In the second proof point (private cloud) – you can support a broad range of “legacy workloads” – but there is a ton of oeprational complexity that even well run converged and hyper-converged infrastructure and validated stacks like the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud can’t remove.&#160; But – if you have a complex enterprise SAP landscape with ton of moving parts, SLAs, and infrastructure dependencies (the definition of “brownfield” if you’ve ever seen it), it’s the only answer.&#160;&#160; <strong><em>Hence – best applicability to brownfield.</em></strong></p> <p><strong>The missing part of the equation was managed services capability at scale – the answer to “I want the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, I want to support my Enterprise P2/P2.5 workloads –<u> I just don’t want to run it”.</u></strong>&#160;&#160; Virtustream fills that gap.&#160;&#160; This is big news.&#160;&#160; For more details, read on!</p> <p> <p>EMC does managed services today for a lot of customers – but only really around for storage services.&#160;&#160; This business is growing rapidly – but there’s a huge demand for more, things like the Federation Enterprise Hybrid cloud on VxBlock and VxRack as a managed service.&#160;&#160; When you see that demand – you need to jumpstart things.&#160;&#160; Virtustream jumpstarts a broad managed services business in the Federation.</p> <p>I suspect some will debate “public vs private vs managed” – each with variations of utility/partial utility/capital economics models.&#160;&#160; </p> <p>Frankly, I’ve noticed people debate and argue that the world is all one way or another (polemic arguments are easy to rally around) – and in my experience and dialogs with customers, it’s never that simple :-)&#160;&#160; I talked about this in the Openstack ecosystem <a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2015/05/emc-and-mirantis-solid-joint-wp.html">here</a> - “software is the answer!”, “no, on-premises appliances is the answer!”, “no, consulting services is the answer!”, “no, managed openstack virtual private instances are the answer!”</p> <p>One thing that I think<strong> is singularly true</strong> is that there’s an ongoing “simplification of infrastructure” and “simplification of consumption” underway in <strong><em>all of these forms.</em></strong></p> <p><strong><em>That leads to a certain clarity of thinking: 1) the Federation needs to lead by having compelling standalone offers in EACH of the categories; 2) we need to take the Federation principle of “Choice” – and deliver the best portfolio of each type of cloud offer across the market; 3) we need to offer them all directly as EMC/VMware/Pivotal, and also through our partner ecosystem.</em></strong><a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301bb083478a3970d-pi"><img title="image" style="border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; float: none; margin-left: auto; display: block; border-top-width: 0px; margin-right: auto" border="0" alt="image" src="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b7c79074d7970b-pi" width="597" height="303" /></a></p> <p>Virtustream is a big acquisition ($1.2B) – and highlights we’re not messing around.&#160;&#160; We needed to build critical mass in the middle category (where we don’t really play today).</p> <p><a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b7c79074db970b-pi"><img title="image" style="border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin-left: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; margin-right: 0px" border="0" alt="image" src="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b7c79074e0970b-pi" width="356" align="left" height="423" /></a> </p> <p>I first ran across Virtustream 3 years ago, when a customer was looking to move their massive enterprise SAP landscape into a managed, hosted private cloud, and were raving about these guys. </p> <p>I was a little incredulous (those workloads come with the most byzantine dependencies).&#160;&#160; <strong><em>It’s not an easy technological problem.</em></strong></p> <p>This is what Virtustream was born doing – and does today.</p> <p>As I dug in, it was interesting to see how Virtustream built their Cloud Management Platform (CMP) called xStream and a set of tools within the app stack with a focus on all those dependencies and SLAs – not just for SAP, but also for the complex Oracle and Microsoft ecosystems.</p> <p>While their brand is not pervasive, over the last 3 years, I’ve seen them in a ton of places, and I’ve never seen anyone who has done as much in this area.</p> <p>It’s for that reason that they have a large customer base and were at a $100M revenue run rate in 2014.</p> <p>We aren’t the only people to think so – see the Forrester Wave view on the left (just the subset of cloud players in the managed/hosted private cloud stacks).</p> <p>In fact, the acquisition of Virtustream is expected to be revenue additive and EPS accretive for the 2016 plan, and we do expect it to be another billion dollar business within a reasonable timeframe.&#160; The same can’t be said for all the players in the managed, hosted private cloud space.</p> <p align="right"><a href="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301b7c79074e5970b-pi"><img title="image" style="border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin-left: 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; margin-right: 0px" border="0" alt="image" src="http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/.a/6a00e552e53bd2883301bb083478a8970d-pi" width="321" align="right" height="365" /></a> </p> <p>Of course – Virtustream alone isn’t the answer – we need to have a portfolio – vCloud Air is a compelling public cloud option – and frankly, we must continue to embrace and extend AWS and other public clouds (see Cloud Foundry, Spanning, and many other examples).</p> <p>Now – it’s notable that this is a Federation-level acquisition, and the team is being held as a Federation-level function.&#160;&#160; VMware and Pivotal were critical in this acquisition decision.</p> <p>Look at the chart to the right (the Gartner assessment of the whole cloud landscape) – it is the answer of why in the Federation – we need more than just Virtustream, and more than just vCloud Air.&#160;&#160; The reality of the cloud ecosystem is somewhat apparent and undeniable.&#160;&#160; With this big move – we are moving our assets, our investment, our commitment up and to the right.&#160;&#160; We are higher than the bulk of the independents, and many of the big players.&#160;&#160; We view it at as a Federation-level effort, and a ecosystem-level effort.&#160;&#160; In the words of Simon West, the Virtustream CMO: <em>“Youngest company on the Magic Quadrant four years running, which puts the first inclusion at only two years of age.”</em></p> <p>Now – how to think of Virtustream and vCloud Air?&#160;&#160; Bill Fathers blog post is excellent – let me add perhaps a way of looking at it:</p> <ul> <li>We are acquiring Virtustream to support <strong>managed</strong> <strong>mission critical enterprise workloads</strong> in the cloud such as SAP and others. For example, last September Virtustream announced an agreement with SAP to provide an option for a full subscription service, including cloud infrastructure, software licenses and software maintenance, for the SAP HANA® platform.&#160;&#160; That doesn’t work well on a ton of the other cloud services out there, and frankly represents a ton of the Enterprise workloads.</li> <li>Now think of VMware vCloud Air.&#160; vCloud Air enables VMware customers to <strong>seamlessly extend their data center applications to a public cloud model</strong>.&#160;&#160; vCloud Air supports almost any workload that runs on vSphere (which is almost everything) Can you deploy SAP in vCloud Air?&#160; Yes.&#160; But, they don’t target a full-blown HANA® workload – or a complex enterprise SAP landscape carrying with it a whole bunch of infrastructure requirements and dependencies.&#160;&#160; They target a broad base of the VMs you have on-premises, and do it really, really well.&#160;&#160; They also are expanding their support for running new P3 workloads on vCloud Air.</li> <li>Now think of Pivotal Web Services.&#160; Pivotal Web Services enables a simple and easy developer on-ramp for people building and running net new “12-factor apps” – and getting a simple, easy taste of Cloud Foundry and the Cloud Foundry marketplace.&#160;&#160; When choosing to run those net new apps at scale – they can run on AWS, but they can also run on the Federation ecosystem – including on the public cloud (vCloud Air), on-premises (Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud) and now as a managed virtual private IaaS cloud as well</li> </ul> <p><strong><em>With the addition of Virtustream, at the Federation can now support all applications (legacy and new), all workloads and all cloud types.&#160;&#160; We can do it on, and off premises.&#160;&#160; We can do it in “small” or “large”.&#160;&#160; Who else can say that?</em></strong></p> <p>Futhermore, while it’s early days, it’s very possible this “big bet” will accelerate development of the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud CMP layer, accelerate other “_____ as a managed service” offerings.</p> <p>Now – people will likely start to assume many things that aren’t right.&#160;&#160; Like “this is the end of Virtustream’s partnership with IBM Softlayer” (answer: who am I to say – but I think people need to internalize that we “get” that we live in an open ecosystem).&#160;&#160; Like “EMC is no longer an ‘enabler of the ecosystem’” (answer: nope – we will keep doing that – in fact, our thinking is to open up the xStream CMP layer for our cloud partners, and maintaining an even playing field for our field and our partners).&#160;&#160;&#160; Time will tell of course – but that’s our thinking.</p> <p><strong><em>And – of course – I would be remiss without giving the Virtustream team, including the CEO Rodney Rogers, a huge welcome to the Federation family!&#160;&#160; Having come in through acquisition, it’s a fun place – and as they form the gravitational center for Federation-level managed services, they have a CRITICAL role to play!</em></strong></p> <p><strong><em>I would love to hear <u>your </u>thoughts – particularly those amongst you who are Virtustream customers!</em></strong></p></p>Chad Sakac2015-05-26T08:39:55-04:00